


Act I

by fallenidol_453



Series: Harbinger [1]
Category: Mystery Case Files (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Don't copy to another site, Explicit Language, Gen, Ghosts, Haunted Houses, Miscommunication, Murder, Novelization, Poisoning, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:00:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27647198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallenidol_453/pseuds/fallenidol_453
Summary: Rookie Detective Moira's very first case should have been exploring a dilapidated mansion and taking photos of its complicated door locks in order to graduate to a Master Detective.But she has a diary in her possession that isn't related to her case - or is it? Will that and the strange clues she finds in the mansion help her solve a historical mystery instead?
Series: Harbinger [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1652131
Kudos: 3





	1. Grounds

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own the Mystery Case Files, all rights go to Big Fish Games. Any mistakes to canon is entirely my fault.
> 
> The "Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence" is done on purpose; I've changed events to where Emma's diary was found intact instead of finding diary pages around the manor, because it would be impossible in real-time to find individual pages intact in a dilapidated manor (much less legible diary entries). I also plucked Agent Barker from Key to Ravenhearst and added him into the story as a mentor. The rest of the game's plot, backstory, and characters (where applicable) have not been changed.
> 
> This is also a novelization of the first game and will not contain explicit references to its direct sequels beyond very vague hints I choose to put in. I am going off what is presented in "Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst" only.

On top of a large hill overlooking the sea, a bare pinprick in the distance, stood the towering Ravenhearst Manor. The hill was a steep uphill hike, occasionally slick with mud and remains of the dense overgrowth that grew on either side of the path. A massive iron gate, with a giant R wrought onto the top, was the only thing separating the manor from the outside world. That gate loomed like a rotten, creaking titan in front of Moira. One gate door hung open askew on creaking hinges, swaying listlessly in the salty breeze. A _Do Not Disturb_ sign was hanging onto one of the rods by a rusted chain. A thicker chain had once fastened the entire gate shut, but vandals had snapped it long ago and left the links to rust and sink into the earth.

Locals swore up and down that the manor had been abandoned for decades, and it was closed off to the public unless one trespassed. But the Mayor of Blackpool had given the Windsor Detective Agency special permission to explore the manor, per the request of a source that was supposed to be anonymous to the agency but was really not, and this was how Moira knew she was… legally allowed to break in and trespass. Just this once. With the Queen of England's permission.

Moira’s mentor Agent Barker had told her that this was going to be an easy assignment. A safe one—as safe as one got in _any_ division of the agency—that would allow her to graduate from her mentorship and become a full-fledged detective. All she had to do was go inside Ravenhearst and take pictures of the door locks the property had a reputation for… and perhaps solve a historical mystery at the same time?

That mystery was contained within a stapled packet deep inside of Moira’s bag: the partially transcribed diary of a woman named Emma Ravenhearst, who had mysteriously disappeared after going to live in the house named after her. The dairy had been found by pure chance in the house by a long-ago explorer and given to the city of Blackpool, who put it on display in their historical society but never released a transcription to the public.

But a transcription had been made in secret at the agency at the behest of their royal benefactor. And what a story it told: Emma's whirlwind romance with Charles Dalimar, a rejected marriage proposal, Emma's slow poisoning by Charles, and Emma plotting to run away from the property with her caretaker Rose. The transcribers had noted in the footnotes that the last few pages were covered in old blood stains and thus impossible to transcribe. They had also added that Emma _may_ have been murdered when she tried to escape, but without a body it was impossible to tell.

Moira suspected that solving the mystery was the real test of graduating her mentorship, and that the task of taking photographs was only a cover-up. But Barker had been infuriatingly vague, if not downright _confused_ , when she had asked questions about the diary, and he had dropped her off at the gates to the manor without answering any of her questions. The only thing he _had_ said was that he'd pick her up at sunset.

Taking a deep breath, Moira walked through the opened gate and hiked up the long hill that led to the manor’s sprawling covered front porch. She only had a few hours to explore today, due to her and Barker getting lost trying to find a way to the manor by car. The manor couldn’t be found on a map, and it wasn’t listed on tour guides. Blackpool’s historical society had been moderately helpful in providing _some_ directions, but they had become moot once Barker had driven out of the city and into the woods.

From the gate, Ravenhearst Manor looked imposing. But the imposing façade crumbled the closer she hiked up to the front porch. The manor was a decayed husk of a corpse, weather-beaten by the sea-salt winds and the storms. Countless trespassers from years past had made the land around the manor their dumping ground, strewing trash and old junk everywhere they could reach. More junk, rusted and grime-covered, littered the front porch. The front door had been splintered and cracked, and it hung oddly on its squeaking hinges. The salty breeze mingled foully with the smelly trash, making Moira gag.

Rather than go inside the house, she decided to explore the grounds first and take advantage of her limited time to explore. There's not much to look at back there anyway, aside from an old greenhouse and some outbuildings, but they were spaced so far apart that it's a long walk to get to them.

&

Moira comes upon the greenhouse first. It's as large and towering as the manor, and it shared the same sad, dilapidated state. Several panes of glass had been cracked or broken, and most of the building was covered in moss and ivy that spilled out from the inside and overtook the exterior like a leafy parasite. A double door made of once white-washed wood marked the entrance, and it not only had carved graffiti on it, it also held the remains of a door lock. Wires had connected the lock to the door, but they had been cut. A thin pipe, presumably for water, had been installed at some point, but it had rusted and broken off. It and at least three valves, plus some fallen wires, lay in the grass.

Moira took pictures of everything: the greenhouse, close-ups of the plant overgrowth, the wires on the door, and even the fallen pipe and valves. In the back of her mind, these extra pictures seemed excessive and a waste of storage space. But she tried to rationalize it: what if the property and the manor were gone tomorrow? These photos she was taking could be the only record left of its existence.

The shed was her next destination, but it was a trip that took longer than it should have due to its proximity to the edge of the cliffs and Moira having to constantly weave in and out of piles of trash trying to find a stable path. The shed had been built next to a dead, gnarled tree that held a collapsed tree house. Rusted tools were scattered about, broken and abused. The roof had caved in, but the walls still stood tall and firm. Vulgar graffiti had been spray painted on them.

The shed’s opened door had a lock on it. The way to unlock it looked like having one of the metal horses affixed to the lock reach the end of a short, straight racetrack. There were also a few tiny cages fixed around the racetrack. What had powered these horses to make them move? What was the purpose of the cages? Moira first took a picture of the entire door, and then took several more pictures of each part of the lock. Every cage, every horse, the whole racetrack. She would have taken pictures from the side, but the fading sunlight and her own shadow obscured the views.

There was nothing of interest in the garden or the backyard; they shared the fate of being a dump site for unwanted trash. Moira could see a lonely little house built far away from the garden though, but there was no identifiable way to access it. It looked like it led to some beach, and perhaps a cave. But that was nothing more than pure fancy; the house was probably just as abandoned as the manor.

The garage was the last place to visit. Located the farthest from the manor, it was a much newer addition to the property but it didn't seem to serve much of a purpose beyond shoving more trash inside and storing an old van that looked like it hadn't been used in years. At least the area around it was clean, so at least someone had either picked up the trash or no one had bothered to come all the way out here and litter. 

By the time Moira was done with the garage, the sun was setting. She picked her way back to the front porch with care as night set in, letting the repulsive smells of the trash be her guide back to her starting point. She strapped on a headlamp and turned it on about halfway there once it got too dark to see clearly.

The encroaching nightfall gave everything a more sinister appearance. What had been heaps of stinking trash in the daylight was now towering blobs of blackness illuminated only by the single bright beam of the headlamp. The skeletal remains of animals both domestic and wild were bleached white, starkly standing out against the grass. Old remains of rusted cars and furniture now had distorted faces staring at her, visible only when Moira just happened to look around to keep to the path.

By the time she reached the gate, it was pitch black out. At the bottom of the hill, she could barely see the bright flashing headlights of the agency car Barker had rented. Moira shakily began her final descent, stepping carefully down a hill she had confidently walked up earlier. It was ages before she finally reached the car and got into the backseat.

“How much did you explore today?” Barker asked.

“Just the grounds. There wasn’t a lot to see, but I did take some pictures.” Moira replied. She turned off her headlamp and took it off her head. “I’ll go inside the house tomorrow. What did _you_ do while I was gone?”

Barker waited until he had driven the car off of the rutted roads and out of the wilderness to reply.

“I was ankle-deep in records, trying to corroborate what Emma wrote in her diary to old editions of the newspapers in Blackpool.”

Moira scoffed. “Sounds boring.”

“I will gladly take looking at old papers to jumping over holes in the floor and breathing in rotten smells. I’m too old for that anyway.” Barker countered good-naturedly. 

Moira chuckled weakly. “Leave me to do all of the dirty work, then? I see how you operate.”

The car jumped and swayed as Barker navigated the streets back to their hotel. He turned the radio on and a trashy pop song played while Moira put her headlamp back into her bag.

“Barker…”

“Mm?”

“I should just focus on pictures of the door locks, right? And not take photos of the house?”

“The door locks? Absolutely. Even if there’s nothing left but bits and pieces,” Barker replied. Moira sighed with relief. “But the manor’s current state has been photographed by people before, so don’t waste the camera’s storage with extra photos.”

“Okay… it’s just, I took photos of the greenhouse, since it had a lock… well, the _remains_ of one, and I took photos of the plants growing out of it.”

Barker pulled into the hotel’s parking lot and turned off the car.

“We can check the pictures once we’re back in our suite.”

&

An hour later, Moira inserted the camera’s SD card into a borrowed agency laptop and pulled up the pictures she took. Her fingers were greasy from the takeout meal Barker had bought, and she absently wiped them on her pants. She moved the mouse away from the picture to give Barker a better look.

“That’s the shed. It’s hard to tell, but up in that tree is a treehouse…” she began.

“Was there a lock on the shed door?” Barker asked.

“Yes.” Moira clicked the next arrow and brought the door lock picture up. She gave Barker the mouse so he could see the next photos at his leisure. “I’m amazed the lock was mostly intact, I thought it’d be broken apart like the greenhouse one I found.”

“Someone must have been patient enough to figure out how to open the door,” Barker stated absently. He coughed into his elbow. “Good job taking close-up shots, that’s what we want. Where are the greenhouse pictures?”

Moira took the mouse back. She closed out of the picture preview and opened up the first image in the camera folder. The greenhouse’s ugly green visage filled the screen.

“Can you imagine what kind of plants must have been housed in there? What a shame to let them grow wild…” Barker muttered. He took the mouse from Moira and clicked the next button. That photo was a close-up of the plant growth, and he quickly deleted it.

“ _Hey!_ ”

“We’re detectives, Moira, not nature photographers,” Barker replied. He heard her huff with annoyance as he deleted the next two pictures and ignored it. He stopped clicking when the third picture popped up. “Is that the door lock?"

The photo was a little blurry; the carved graffiti text had been obscured by the shaky camera and only a few wires were clearly visible. Moira took the mouse from Barker.

“It is. I don’t know what the wires powered though, they’re all gone,” she answered. As she spoke, she used the mouse pointer to move around the empty spaces between wires for emphasis. She clicked on the next picture, which was the rusted valves. “I’m not sure what those were for. They look too small to have watered everything in the greenhouse.”

“Did you see a water source for them?”

“No. But a bunch of those wires on the door looked like they led inside the greenhouse. Not that anyone could get inside, anyway.”

Barker remained silent, so Moira used the opportunity to close out of the picture preview and delete more extraneous shots.

“That’s all the pictures I was able to take,” she said a few minutes later. “Only the shed and the greenhouse had locks on them. What should I do with the pictures?”

“Make a folder on the desktop and put them in there. It’ll save some space on the camera.”

Moira obeyed. She renamed each picture with a short description while Barker cleaned up the remains of their meal and threw it out. When she was done, she removed the SD card and turned the computer off.

“Barker, do I need to keep a diary for this case?”

“For a case like this, a diary isn’t necessary,” Barker replied. “But when you’re a full Master Detective, you must keep a diary of every case you go on and record everything that goes on as they happen. No exceptions, or Sterling will be pissed.”

Sterling was the supervisor of the Paranormal division of the agency; he was a short, thin man who wore glasses with thick frames and even thicker lenses. He was so mild-mannered and relaxed that the thought of him being angry almost made Moira laugh.

“Have you ever seen Sterling angry?” she asked.

“Twice throughout my long career. It wasn’t a pretty sight.”

Moira nodded sagely. “I won’t make him angry, I promise.”

“Good. Now I strongly suggest going to bed, because I’m dropping you off at the manor at dawn tomorrow.” Barker said. “You’re going to want as much daylight as possible when exploring the inside of Ravenhearst.”

His tone brokered no argument. Moira checked the clock - nearly nine - and decided to follow his advice. Her mentor’s crack at jumping over holes in the floor might literally be true tomorrow, and she did not want to get herself injured or killed because she was sleep-deprived and misjudged the distance between one point and the next.


	2. First Floor

Barker hadn't been joking about being at the manor by dawn. Moira had been woken up when it was still dark out, and the sun was barely rising when she was dropped off at the bottom of the hill. The dewy mist gave her hike an otherworldly appearance as mud squelched under her boots, and the manor looked… whole, as the sun rose behind it. But the smells of the dumped trash soon shattered that fantastic illusion. Moira stopped at the top of the hill and took out her full-face respirator mask and headlamp from her bag. After putting them on and making careful adjustments to make sure her mask fit, she ventured onward toward the porch.

Enough people had trespassed up here to the point where there was a well-defined, relatively clean path through the trash and debris. Moira still had to dodge glass shards and rusted nails, but they were easy to spot and avoid. Up close, the covered porch is a sad sight. There are large holes in the awning, and most of the steps leading up to the front door are rotted and dangerously close to caving in. She grabbed a handrail for support after inspecting it for protruding nails, and clamored up the steps. There’s a large hole to the left of the front door where part of the porch had caved in.

The front door still stands open. Someone had nailed a CONDEMNED notice to it long ago, but the ink had faded with the passage of time. Moira turned her headlamp on and took a hesitant step inside the house. It’s dimly lit, sunlight barely filtering in through the grimy windows. Her headlamp shines on a wooden staircase that takes up most of the room, which likely existed as an entryway. The staircase looks solid enough, though from her vantage point it looks like two of the steps have caved in.

It’s hard to tell where all of the trash around her originated: did it originate here in the entryway and spill out onto the porch? Or was it the other way around? It goes up to Moira’s ankles, with higher piles existing in grimy corners.

Moira carefully put a foot forward. It stepped onto trash but abruptly sank downward, and she yanked her leg back. She kicked aside the trash and discovered she only stepped on a particularly deep pile of it, not a hole in the floor. Steeling her nerves, she kicked aside more trash and moved forward.

She sees two doors next, both of them open but leading in opposite directions. The door on the right looked like it had something on it, so she went over there first.

The door is wide open, exposing the darkened room beyond. Moira partially closes it to inspect what’s on the front of it. There was a dusty purple bottle with no discernable label turned upside down, and a tiny blowtorch had burned whatever lock there was on the door off and scorched part of the door frame. She stepped forward to push the door open, and felt her foot step on something hard. She bent down and picked up a tiny clock, its hands reading 9:30. The glass protecting the hands and clock face had been shattered.

 _Well, this looks odd. What kind of lock had this been?_ Moira thought. _Some kind of science project? Had blowtorches, much less that tiny one on the door, been invented in 1895?_

With a little struggle, she takes her camera out and takes photos. A wide shot of the door showing the whole lock, and then each individual surviving component, including the clock and the scorch marks on the door frame. Once those are done, she sets the clock down on top of some trashed books and pushes the door open again, stepping inside.

An old curtain covering a single window prevents most light from coming into the room. Moira’s headlamp didn’t have a good enough reach, but she can barely make out the remains of a wooden side table and a rusted bed frame. Anything that had been on there--mattress, pillow, maybe a blanket or two--were all gone. The floor, at least what could be seen from the thin layer of trash, was bare wood.

This room was too plain to be used by Emma or Charles. Was it meant for servants such as Rose?

Moira took a step back and closed the door. This room, the suspected servant's quarters, had nothing of interest to her beyond its door lock. She turned around and went straight through the other door.

&

The new room, either a living room or a parlor, was slightly brighter thanks to large windows that overlooked the beach, but it looked like a war zone. Furniture, including what looked like a grand piano, had been overturned violently or smashed to smithereens. Some of the windows had their glass panes cracked or broken, the shards littering the floor. A single moth-eaten curtain barely hung onto the curtain rod it had been violently ripped from, and it lay in a collapsed heap on the floor. Thick cobwebs covered the ceiling corners.

As Moira walked in, dust motes sprang up from the once-fine carpets on the floor. She scraped her boots along the dust, exposing part of a carpet. Unfortunately, it was too dark of a color to see if there were bloodstains. Emma’s final, blood-stained diary entry made no mention of where she was when she was presumably murdered.

Who had done all of this damage? Had Charles done it when he discovered Rose and Emma preparing to leave, to make their escape harder? Did Rose do it to either evade Charles or hinder him from sabotaging the escape from the manor? It was so hard to tell. She hoped Rose was able to escape the manor safely.

Moira pushed several damaged items aside to thoroughly explore the perimeter. There seemed to be no other way in or out of this room other than the door she came in and another closed door on the opposite end of the room. As she passed the grand piano, she chanced a look up and froze.

There was a large hole in the ceiling. She looked down.

What she had taken for debris on her first look at the room was actually a man’s corpse. His clothes didn’t look more than twenty years old. Moira inhaled sharply. She had been… warned about this by Barker, before their almost four hour drive to Blackpool from Edinburgh. _If the police didn’t catch the trespassers, the manor caught them instead._

She backed away and turned around. She didn’t want to walk near his body, because she was worried she might throw up. Seeing the animal skeletons outside had been one thing; death was a natural thing in the world, particularly for animals. It was completely different seeing a human corpse. Had that man come in here on a dare? Or had he come here of his own free will? Did he step wrong and fall through? Just how _bad_ was the floor upstairs?

In between shoving aside more debris, Moira looked up at the ceiling. It looked solid enough, aside from cracks caused by the foundation weakening. Maybe what the man had fallen through was a mere weak spot. She tried to keep that thought in mind as she shoved aside a path to the closed door.

A large sun and moon had been delicately carved into it, with twelve indents carved in a circle between them. Paint chips flaked off of the wood. If the indents once held tokens, they've been scattered and lost for decades. Wires had been attached to the door knob, but someone had cut them in order to get inside. She takes pictures anyway, the bright flash of her camera hurting her eyes.

As her eyes adjusted, Moira noticed a strange etching that looked like it went around the indents. She peered closer. The letters look like Latin or Spanish, but they’re not very legible.

 _Oh well. If I managed to get the words on camera, I’ll see if Barker can translate them_ , Moira thought.

Rather than open the door, Moira made her way back to the front porch instead. She carefully removed her mask and made herself drink some water and eat the snacks she’d stowed away in her bag this morning. She didn’t want to collapse inside the house from exhaustion and dehydration. That would force Barker to come inside the house, and she didn’t want him to hurt himself trying to find her.

_I hope he’s having fun reading old newspapers._

&

Back inside the house, Moira opened the closed door in the living room. Grimy windows letting in the sunlight enable her to see with minimal aid from her headlamp. The room is about the same size as the room behind her, but made smaller with the large, overturned furniture and stone fireplace crowded inside. The walls are covered in peeling wallpaper, but the colors are oddly mismatched depending on whether or not they were exposed to sun. The wallpaper not constantly exposed to sunlight is a lovely lilac color, while the sunlight-exposed versions have faded considerably.

Moira took a careful step inside. The fireplace has old, blackened logs and ashes from a long-ago fire. The overturned furniture is more difficult to navigate around or push aside due to their size. She has to tiptoe around most of them, trying to make her way toward the next room, which has no door on it. Someone must have removed it from its hinges. At least the destruction in this room isn’t as bad as the room previous.

She heard a crunching noise as she neared the threshold to the next room and looked down. Faded, empty snack wrappers and dead flies. She hastily wiped her boot clean on the dusty carpet and then stepped over the pile to move on ahead. The remains of a huge cobweb prevented her from entering what looked like a dining room.

 _I hate being allergic to cobwebs_ , Moira thought bitterly. She picked up a long chunk of wood and removed the web, careful to remove every trace of it and not let it get on her clothes. Even if the web was old, she didn’t want to touch it by accident with her bare skin later. A trip to the hospital to deal with the allergic reaction would severely compromise her exploration.

She threw aside the wood into some dark corner and stepped inside. The dining room table took up most of the room and it still stood upright, though all of its chairs were gone. There was nothing else of note to see. The opened door on the opposite wall showed what looked like the kitchen, but something blocked the way inside. Moira walked around the table to get a closer look.

The blockage was on the kitchen side, and it was too tall for Moira to bend over and look to see what it was. Even if she could move it, the amount of trash and rotted food piling up in front of it presented a significant and probably _very_ smelly obstacle. There was a steady hum of flies coming from somewhere, and Moira swatted several of them away. The white brick of the walls inside the kitchen were sooty in some areas, while other parts of the wall remained in shadow from the large stoves, ovens, and hanging pots and pans--what was left of them, anyway. If she craned her head to the left, she could barely make out a closed door on the right side of the kitchen wall.

Seeing the kitchen jogged Moira’s memory. Emma’s diary had mentioned Rose discovering the source of Emma’s mystery illness: Phosphorus White, a key ingredient in poison. She dug the diary transcription out and turned to the August 4, 1895 entry.

 _Charles never let Rose prepare Emma any meals, despite her being a servant and caretaker to Emma. It was the only thing he did outside of “affixing random items to doors inside the house”, according to the diary_ , Moira thought. She put the diary away. 

He must have begun poisoning her after she said she was leaving for America to look after her sick father. It corroborated with Emma’s last diary entries, or what could be translated from it: she thought he wanted to keep her with him forever. Making her increasingly sick and housebound was the way to go.

Unless Charles wanted to make Emma sick until she accepted a second marriage proposal? If he even thought about doing it? The diary did mention Rose finding a wedding dress that Emma had been having nightmares about. Why else would he go to drastic lengths making her one when she had already rejected his first proposal?

 _God, this is making my head hurt_ , Moira thought. She stepped back and looked out of one of the dining room windows. It was still sunny out, though it was hard to tell if it was setting. She better wrap up her search just in case.

She turned around and carefully walked back to the entryway. A mental map of this floor was already forming in her head: the rooms connected to each other, with no hallways to separate them. The first floor was more or less a large rectangle broken up into six or seven rooms, plus the front porch on the outside. But the closed door in the kitchen bothered her. Where did it lead? Was it like the other rooms and led into a room she already visited? Or was it a separate room?

Moira looked outside. The sun was barely starting to set. If she made her exploration quick, she could be back to where Barker was parked before nightfall. She went back to the servant’s quarters and walked inside. She scanned the walls with her headlamp until she found a closed white door in a corner of the room. After making sure the floor looked and felt secure, she walked over to it and gingerly opened it a little.

Good thing, too, because a pile of trash, rotted food, and flies, both dead and alive, trickled in.

 _God, gross!_ Moira thought. She slammed the door shut after seeing the white brick wall of the kitchen. So her hypothesis was right, the rooms did connect to each other on this first floor. She wasn’t sure about the other floors, but she’d worry about that later.

She hurried out of the room and onto the front porch, jumping down to the ground instead of using the stairs a second time. As the sun set, she briskly walked to the hill and carefully made her way down to the bottom just as Barker pulled up in the car.

&

A couple of hours later, after showering and thoroughly sanitizing her respirator mask, Moira showed Barker the first floor door locks.

“I think this room led to the servants’ quarters,” she said. She showed him a picture of the purple bottle, then the clock. “I don’t know what the premise of lock was though. Did blowtorches even _exist_ in 1895?”

“They did, just not in that tiny of a size,” Barker replied. He clicked through to the next set of pictures. “What room did this lead to?”

The sun and moon lock pictures filled the screen. Moira remained silent, remembering the body.

“Moira?”

She gave a small start. “Sorry. That led to the. Um. I think a parlor?”

She took the mouse from Barker and clicked the next arrow, showing a closeup to the indents. She scrutinized it for a moment before turning the laptop over to him.

“Do you see any carved words?” she inquired.

Barker leaned closer to the screen, squinting against the bright glare. It was several minutes of back and forth clicking, during which Moira sketched out a layout of the manor’s first floor, before he straightened his back and shook his head.

“I found some, but I couldn’t see them clearly. They looked like Spanish, so my guess is that it’s graffiti,” he answered. He deleted the pictures containing the words. “Did you find anything else?”

“I found someone’s body,” Moira blurted out. She quickly drew a circle on her map in the square labeled _Living Room_. “Uh--right here. They were wearing clothes that were… well, I think the clothes were fashionable twenty years ago, I guess.”

Barker shrugged. “Unlucky trespasser, I guess.”

“Should we let the police know?”

“We can after your investigation concludes,” Barker said. “If we do it now, then we will never be able to find the rest of the door locks and take pictures of them.”

"Ah... right." Moira replied awkwardly.

He was right, of course. Dying during a case or having the _proper authorities_ descend on your investigation and take over from there were the banes of every agent's existence. It wasn't that they didn't have a distrust of police officers, but those same officers didn't understand that what the agency did was clandestine, or the fact that they dealt with crimes that were supernaturally or magically created. Sometimes it was better for an agent to keep their mouth shut until their investigation was over, and _then_ call the authorities if anything remained.

She wanted to ask Barker about the diary, but he didn't seem inclined to talk any further. Maybe tomorrow, if she can prod him and gauge his reaction at the right time. His confusion yesterday seemed to be genuine though, which worried her.

Tomorrow. She'd ask tomorrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dead body Moira finds is pure invention on my part, no such thing exists in the original Ravenhearst game.
> 
> The cobweb allergy is lifted from Key to Ravenhearst, where (I think) the lighthouse Hidden Object Scene features a cobweb that you can click on and the Master Detective will make a comment about being allergic to it.


	3. Second Floor

The next day dawned with gusty winds and dark clouds, forcing Barker and Moira to wait until after sunrise to set out. It started to sprinkle as Barker drove them out of Blackpool, and the rain increased in intensity as they neared the manor. When Barker finally pulled the car into a stop, Moira put on her face mask and headlamp, and then a large rain coat over those and her bag.

“Do you think it’s safe to go inside today, with the winds?” she asked.

“We’ll make this a half day exploration,” Barker replied. “Don’t linger over anything, just look for door locks and don’t take as many pictures. A single wide shot is fine. If you feel like you’re in danger, get out of the manor immediately and call me. Did you bring your phone?”

Moira opened her bag. Camera, Emma’s transcribed diary, phone. She took it out and held it up. Barker nodded in approval and she put it back.

“I’ll try to pick you up at noon. If I’m not here by then, don’t panic and don’t stray,” Barker instructed. “I will try to call you if I’m running late.”

Moira nodded in understanding. She pulled the raincoat’s large hood over her head, got out of the car, and shut the door firmly with her gloved hand. The wind blew the rain in all directions, and she was glad for the coat as she began her ascent up the hill. The terrain was a quagmire of deep mud and slippery leaves, forcing her to take her time getting to the top. She didn’t push her hood back or unzip her coat until she was inside the manor’s entryway.

_Let’s see what these stairs look like._

Trash stuck to her muddy boots as she walked over to the staircase. The third and fifth steps were caved in, with the second step well on its way to the same fate. Moira climbed the first step and put her foot on the second step. It groaned horribly, and she extended her leg up to the fourth step quickly to heave herself up there. She stepped over the fifth step, gripping the bannister for support, and carefully climbed the rest of the way up to the second floor.

A long hallway was the first thing she saw at the top of the landing. All of the doors looked like they were shut. She looked down. The remains of a dusty, emerald green carpet lined the wood floor, with old footprint impressions left behind by several previous explorers. It looked like there weren't any holes in the floor. Yet. Moira carefully stepped forward.

The first two doors she came across both had locks on them. She turned to her left and shined her headlamp on it. There was a crude dial that she could manipulate to show different colored patterns. A tiny pistol, a chicken made out of some kind of metal, a tiny but thick boot-like shoe, and a small typewriter with a lever attached had been affixed to the door. The boot could kick the chicken if Moira manipulated the lever, which made her giggle. She snapped a picture and turned around to look at the door behind her.

Most of the lock’s components had fallen to the floor, but there was a small chalkboard still attached to the wood. Moira snapped a photo, and then bent down to investigate the stuff on the floor. A crude fortune teller's head, a metal fish, and some kind of… coin catcher? She took a second photo of these and stood up.

Neither door looked like they had a door knob. Moira pushed the one closest to her with her palm. The door stuck fast and wouldn’t budge. She turned around and tried the other door, which thankfully opened fairly easily. All she could see from a glance was a giant tub… and that was all of the information she needed. If there was a toilet in there, she did _not_ need to see it. After checking the floor, she walked up to the next set of rooms.

The door on her left was obstructed by what looked like an overturned, small table, but the dust and trash covering it made it difficult to tell. The door on her right had been left open. Taxidermied animal heads lined the walls, dusty and covered in old cobwebs. Moira hesitantly stepped inside the threshold after making sure no new cobwebs obstructed her path. She could see odd spaces in the walls where some of the heads had been removed. When she did a careful sweep of the floor, she found a large hole near the middle of the room. She stepped carefully over to it and looked down. She could barely make out the shape of the dead man she found in the living room yesterday.

 _Huh. Not just a trespasser, but a possible thief too,_ she thought grimly.

She couldn’t see the appeal of stealing these… heads. They were odd to look at, and did nothing but glorify senseless killings of rare animals. She turned around and left the room.

None of the rooms on this floor looked like they were… liveable, or at least functioned like bedrooms. Unless those two rooms Moira encountered earlier counted, and she was only willing to bet they were for a guest. The other rooms were probably for show, like the taxidermy room, or were for entertainment purposes only.

The room next door had another lock. There was an old, opened tin can that probably held some kind of food turned over onto a shattered plate. A large rusted hamster wheel was to its right, and that looked like it was attached to the door knob, or it at least unlocked the door. When Moira stepped forward to get a closer look, her boot stepped on a windup mouse toy. There was also… some sort of primitive slot machine? Moira took photos of the lock and of the mouse, and then tried to open the door, but it gave in a little. She put more force into the next push, using her shoulder for leverage, and finally managed to open the door. She heard _things_ being pushed out of the way, and cautiously poked her head in.

The room was stuffed with old crates, with the contents of some overflowing out and spilling onto the floor. Some looked like old toys, while others were more mundane household items. Dust coated every available surface.

 _This must be a storage room. Emma did joke in her diary that Charles hoarded useless things in the manor…_ Moira thought uncomfortably. _Did he use these for his door lock experiments?_

Knowing the man, he probably did. Moira slammed the door shut. She heard a clap of thunder outside and opened her bag to check her phone. The bright home screen, showing a selfie of her at her older brother's wedding, displayed a time of 9:23 A.M. If she limited her exploration to just this floor, she could be done well before noon. She turned the phone off and put it back in her bag.

The next room on the other side of the wall was not directly across from either the storage room or the taxidermy room. Instead, it was set in the gap between both rooms. Unfortunately, the door could not be opened no matter how hard Moira pushed and kicked the wood. She eventually gave up and moved further up to the end of the hallway. There was a staircase leading up to the third floor, which looked much more solid than the one in the entryway.

The room to the left of the purported storage room also could not be opened, at least not all the way. Something seemed to obstruct the door on the other side, which explained the slamming noise Moira kept hearing every time she tried the door. She tried shining her headlamp into the crack, but it was too dark to pick anything out. What was in here, more shit Charles hoarded?

Rather than wearing herself out trying to open the door, Moira turned around to investigate the last door behind her. A window overlooking the nearby staircase provided a little light, but the horrendous rain pouring outside didn’t let much of it come in. A broken pane of glass allowed her to hear the howling wind, and feel the raindrops being blasted inside. She looked down at the floor. It was wet, and the wood began splintering when she put pressure on it with her boot tip.

 _I really hope the whole area in front of the door isn’t a hazard zone,_ Moira thought.

She side-stepped the area and tried standing nearer to the wall. The floor didn’t groan as badly, but it was more difficult to see the door lock from the side. She went back to her original spot and picked up her camera. She could barely make out the individual components of the lock, much less what made the door open.

Moira did one wide shot, making sure the flash was turned on. She then leaned forward as close as she dared without stepping forward, getting in a few more shots that she prayed weren’t as blurry as she feared they were. She wanted to try opening the door, but didn’t want to risk the floor caving in. If the weather had improved by tomorrow, she could try again then.

She took out her phone and looked at the time. 9:55 A.M. Her exploration hadn’t taken very long at all.

 _Screw waiting until noon, I don’t want to wait inside this house with this storm raging outside,_ Moira thought. She began walking back to the staircase that would take her back to the ground level. _I just hope the phone reception is good._

&

It took five minutes to navigate going downstairs. The second step finally caved in after her descent, though Moira was able to avoid getting her foot stuck in the debris. After making it to the front porch, she stood on the most stable portion of it and took her phone back out. There was barely any reception, but if she moved slightly closer to the handrail, there was enough for her to call Barker.

“Y-Yes?” Barker’s voice was faint and hard to hear over the weather.

“Pick me up please!?” Moira shouted.

Silence. Then:

“What?”

Moira moved a little further to the left.

“Pick. Me. Up!” she enunciated as clearly as she could.

“O-Okay. On-One hour. M--”

The call dropped.

“Fucking reception,” Moira growled. At least Barker had gotten her message.

Rather than wait inside the manor, because there was nowhere to sit inside, Moira left the porch and began walking around the manor’s perimeter. She kicked aside trash as she went, trying to wipe off as much mud and trash from inside the house off of her boots as she could on the exposed grass. The last thing she wanted--though she was sure the agency didn’t care--was to dirty up the floor of the car.

She started seeing roof shingles as she went around the back, scattered like dead flies in the grass. When she rounded a corner, she saw what looked like a door cut into the wall and went over to open it. A staircase led down under the manor, though she could only see the first few steps thanks to her headlamp.

_What’s this? A cellar?_

Moira carefully went down the stairs after using some heavy pieces of trash to keep the door open against the wind. She soon found herself standing in a small room, with the three walls each sporting a locked door.

_Okay, maybe not a cellar. A basement, perhaps? This is an odd-looking basement though._

The basement had probably been much more open in the past, but someone - probably Charles, judging from the locks - had deliberately made it smaller by putting these three rooms down here. Maybe it was more storage space for his hoarding obsession. Could these rooms be reached from inside the manor, or were they only accessible from the outside?

 _I really don’t want to go back inside the manor,_ Moira thought. _I can come back in here and explore either tomorrow or the day after that._

She turned around and looked up the stairs. This staircase was not solid like the ones inside the manor; this one was crudely built, and it had large gaps between the steps. If she wasn’t careful about picking her feet up, the steps could become a major tripping hazard. 

Moira ascended the stairs slowly, taking one step at a time and only moving forward when both feet were on a step. When she reached the top and stepped outside, she moved the heavy debris aside and shut the door behind her. She took out her phone again to check the time. Barely fifteen minutes had passed.

_Fuck it. I’m going to the bottom of the hill. Who knows, it might take up the next half hour, and Barker will be waiting for me when I finally get there._

Moira walked back across the grounds and to the top of the hill, where she slowly began to descend. She slipped on the sodden mud halfway down, landing hard on her side as she began a graceless slide the rest of the way down. Finding nothing to safely grab onto, she clutched her bag to her chest, closed her eyes, and held on for dear life until she stopped sliding.

She cautiously opened her eyes once she was on solid ground. Her pants and raincoat were soaked with rain and mud, though the rain was washing most of it off her coat. Her side hurt, and she was sure she’d sprained her ankle.

No sign of Barker.

Lucky for her, because her descent dumped her right in the middle of the road. Despite her bright yellow coat, Barker may have hit her with the car, and wouldn’t _that_ be a lovely story to tell her family of why she was in the hospital again? Or God forbid, the morgue?

Moira gingerly stood up, grabbing a nearby sapling for leverage. As she got her balance, she saw a pair of headlights approaching quickly that slowed down at the sight of her. A single honk of the horn had her moving toward the car.

“What happened to you?” Barker asked as she opened the backseat door and tumbled in.

“Slipped down the hill,” Moira replied as she untangled her wet coat and removed her facemask. She slammed the door shut. “Just drive.”

&

“How was the exploration today?” Barker asked a few hours later.

“Not bad, considering the weather. My fall was just an unfortunate accident,” Moira answered. She adjusted the ice on her ankle and motioned for the laptop. Barker handed it to her so she could insert the camera's SD card. “What did you do today?”

“Mostly spent the morning touching up those photos you snapped of the first floor,” Barker said. “How far into the house did you go?”

Moira pulled up the new photos. “Just the second floor. It was pretty small, and I didn’t linger searching for too long. Judging from what I saw, the second floor was probably for guests and entertainment purposes. If any guests ever _stayed_ up there.”

Barker snorted with laughter. Moira gave him the laptop back so he could scroll through the photos.

“I think I found a basement, but it wasn’t connected to the manor itself. I was only able to reach it from the outside and going behind the house,” Moira commented.

“What did you find?” Barker asked absently. He deleted a blurry photo.

“Three rooms. Three doors. All of them were locked.”

Barker turned his head to look at her. “Were they the same locks the manor had?”

“I didn’t look close enough,” Moira replied. She shrugged. “But they probably were.”

“Hmmm. If the weather keeps up like this, explore that basement tomorrow instead of the third floor,” Barker suggested. “It might be a little safer under the house than a rickety third floor.”

“Unless the house decides to collapse. God knows it’s close to it anyway.”

Barker finished examining the pictures, removed the SD card, and shut the laptop down.

“If the manor could stay standing for this long, in all kinds of weather, I doubt a single wind gust will knock it over like a pile of cards.”

Moira rolled her eyes at him when his back was turned.

&

She went to bed early, mostly as an excuse to rest her ankle. The rain lashing the windows made her fall asleep quickly, and she didn't even realize she forgot to ask about the diary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The two rooms left unexplored were the Game Room and Theatre; I wasn't sure how to incorporate those into the narrative since they were not mentioned in the diary, so I left them out.
> 
> Also, the way the rooms on this floor are spaced out a little weirdly in the game's map, so I tried my hardest to make it make sense, I guess.


	4. Third Floor

The winds died down overnight, but the rain persisted in a steady downpour. Moira slogged up the hill at midmorning and into the manor, making her way up to the third floor with care. The layout of this floor was similar to downstairs, but it was more… welcoming, in a sense. Sort of. There was almost no trash covering the floors, but at least two of the doors sported Charles’s locks.

_Emma must have lived up here._

The pale colored wallpaper on the walls had molded and yellowed with age, making it difficult to determine its original color. Moira found strange, irregularly spaced brown splotches on it leading down the right side of the hallway toward the same staircase whose landing she stood on, but chalked it up to those areas being more moldy. The ceiling had deep cracks in the plaster, and here and there she could see water damage. Whether it came from pipes or damage from the attic, she couldn’t tell.

After checking the floor, Moira walked up to the first door. The wooden door was warped, but it hung open, allowing her to see inside. It looked like the remains of a study, or some sort of reading room. Dark green or black wallpaper covered the walls, making the room smaller than it appeared. A large desk had been positioned by a window, which was obscured by frayed curtains. She could barely make out a once plush armchair in one corner of the room. Mice had had a field day with it at some point, because some of the stuffing was sticking out and littered the floor. Books lay scattered between the desk and chair. As much as Moira wanted to pick one up and read the contents, who knew what lay on them. Cobwebs? Spiders? She didn’t want to know.

She backed away and turned around to face the next door across from the study. This one was decorated with a lock. It was covered in clocks of varying sizes, their glass faces missing. The largest clock had moveable hands, which Moira could manipulate to match the smaller clocks. A few spaces beneath the smaller clocks had been opened, revealing a tiny compartment to store something. She took photos of those, and shot a short video of her moving the big clock’s hands to match one of the small clocks--and the panel underneath it opening to reveal a devil head--to demonstrate that the lock worked. There had once been a long panel made of blackened wood affixed to the bottom of the lock by the door knob, but someone had knocked it to the floor.

 _I wonder what you put inside that panel?_ Moira thought. _Whatever was underneath the tiny clocks?_

She tried the door knob. It turned easily, though she had to give the door a good yank to open. The room inside was completely dark. Moira turned on her phone’s flashlight to give her more light to see by and moved it around, seeing rows of bookshelves. She angled down. There was a huge dead spider near a pile of books close to the door, and more books were either stacked waist-high or piled haphazardly in between the bookshelves.

Was this Charles’s library, where Emma had found those books that chilled her heart? The books of witchcraft and dark magic, and how to communicate with the dead? Moira tiptoed inside and stepped in between two bookshelves after checking carefully for cobwebs. Her phone shined on old leather bound books, the words on the spines obscured by dust. She dusted one of the spines off and squinted to read the title.

_Talk… Talk to the Dead? A lovely read, I’m sure._

She backed up and went to stand in front of another bookcase. This one was covered in cobwebs, and most of the books had been pilfered. Behind her was a great stone fireplace with two chairs positioned in front of it. The source of the room’s darkness was a heavy velvet curtain along one wall that covered a large window. She walked a little further, and then stopped in her tracks.

A whole row of bookcases had been tipped over, spilling their contents all over the floor. Mice had chewed on the opened pages, but that’s not what Moira was focusing on. She thought she saw a boot sticking out from underneath one of the tipped over bookcases and dislodged books.

“Jesus fucking shitfuck,” she hissed. “I’m done here.”

She turned her phone's flashlight off and walked out of the library as fast as she could. How many dead bodies was she going to _find_? How many dead bodies were still hidden in this forsaken and neglected shithole of a manor?

-

She didn’t stop walking until she came across the second door lock, and put her phone away. A massive wood square had been placed on the door, with at least a hundred small squares carved into it. Tiny objects such as animal figurines or miniature dollhouse furniture had been inserted into the squares, with more cluttering the ground in front of the door. Moira accidentally crushed three of them under her boot trying to take photos. There seemed to be no purpose for this lock, or even a way to solve it.

But maybe that’s what Charles would have wanted. To stall Rose and Emma if they tried to escape, to make them try to solve puzzles that have no solution, and make their escape from Ravenhearst next to impossible. A chill ran down Moira’s spine at the thought of it as she put her camera away.

At least the door opened. But what lay on the other side almost made her heart stop.

A nursery.

The same nursery Emma found her unopened correspondence from her family back in the United States. 

Moira could see a large crib just inside the door. She took her phone out again and turned on the flashlight. Old cobwebs had been created in the spaces between the bars of the crib. The wallpaper was a white-ish color.

The ceiling had collapsed. Exploring the room was next to impossible. Disappointed, Moira turned her phone off and went back out into the hallway. The strange brown splotches patterned the wall were in front of her again, and they seemed to have their origin in a room at the very end of the hall. She carefully walked up to it, nudging the door open with her booted foot.

Her headlamp shined on a large four-poster bed that had had its curtains ripped off. She walked inside and saw a desk underneath a window, a closed door leading to another room, and double doors leading out to a balcony. The furniture had been spaced widely apart, ostensibly to make room for people to move in…

Move in--

Moira dug the diary out and flipped to the July 13, 1895 entry. Emma had written about her nightmare about wearing a white wedding dress, sitting in her _wheelchair_. The widely spaced furniture made much more sense now.

Emma had lived here. Emma had slept here. Rose had taken care of Emma here. Moira shakily put the diary away and inhaled sharply. She felt like she was desecrating a sacred place just by standing in here.

She walked towards the closed door and opened it. Inside was a room nearly bare with furniture, except for a giant cracked mirror and an enormous wardrobe carved out of dark wood. The wardrobe doors were shut, but Moira didn’t need to imagine what lay inside. That wardrobe was where Rose had found the wedding dress Emma dreamt about. Charles must have squirreled it away in there at some point… maybe hoping for the day Emma would finally agree to marry him?

Moira turned around and took a deep breath. Good God, Charles’s obsession with Emma was fucked up.

She walked toward the bed. A large carpet had been placed underneath the bed frame, and the mattress had been stripped bare of blankets and pillows. Next to the bed was the desk. She walked around the bed to take a closer look, but froze in her tracks.

There was an overturned wheelchair right in front of her. A large blood stain covered a part of the white painted desk, with smaller droplets of blood littering the walls in front of and next to the desk. When Moira crept closer and angled her headlamp, she saw more blood stains on the wheelchair and the floor.

No one could have taken a bludgeoning like that and survive. All of that blood must have soaked into the end of Emma's diary, covering up what would have been her final entry.

The transcribers of Emma’s diary had been right after all: she had been murdered. Moira took her camera out with shaking hands and tried to hold back her tears as she began to take photos. The wheelchair, the desk, the bloodstains, all of it. She already knew what Barker was going to say: that all this blood couldn’t prove Emma was murdered here. It could have been someone else’s blood. But the wheelchair, and the blood spattered onto it, could make a somewhat strong argument.

Moira looked down. There was a small blood trail on the pale colored floor leading to the bedroom door. She took a video of that on her phone, stopping at the threshold. So that was the origin of the mysterious stains on the walls. Emma must have been carried out of her bedroom and… to where? Where would she be buried? The grounds surrounding the manor were vast and covered with trash. Her body could be anywhere under the ground, unless Charles decided to dispose of her body in the ocean.

But--no. The ocean burial didn’t make sense. Charles wanted to keep Emma with him _forever_. It would make more sense for him to keep her close, and hide her body somewhere in the manor.

 _I don’t think I even want to know where she’s buried_ , Moira thought unhappily. _She could be buried under the floorboards on one of the floors and I’d be none the wiser._

She checked the time. Late afternoon. It was almost time for Barker to come pick her up. After taking photos of the wardrobe and the desk, she left the manor and carefully picked her way down the hill to wait for him.

-

Moira tried to keep her hands steady as she booted up the agency laptop and inserted the camera's SD card. She didn't want to do this review right now, but she didn't want Barker to think something was amiss and stall him further than she already had tonight.

"I went up to the third floor instead of the basement. I think... well, there were only two locks," she began. She opened up the gallery of pictures and opened the first one. Barker leaned forward with interest. "Only one of them--not this one, but the next one--could be solved. I also shot a video on my phone of me showing this first lock still worked."

"Huh. Where's the video?" Barker asked. He clicked through the pictures of the first lock as Moira retrieved her phone. "Did any of these clocks work?"

Moira retrieved the first video and showed him. "The smaller clocks were stationary, but when I moved the big clock hands to match the small clock's time…"

She turned the phone volume up so they could both hear the small panel opening.

"I guess you had to take whatever was in the compartment and stick it into the large panel that was on the floor," she continued. "I think that may have been key to opening the door."

"Fascinating. I'm surprised it still works after all this time," Barker mused. He clicked the forward button until he found the first picture of the second lock. "What… is this? The one that couldn't be solved?"

Moira grimaced and nodded. Barker looked at her, then back at the computer screen, then back at her.

"What made you think this lock couldn't be solved?" he asked.

Moira bit her bottom lip in thought.

"There didn't seem to be any reason or pattern to the items in the holes," she began. "Plus… I don't think I took a picture, but there wasn't anything attached to the door knob. I think the puzzle was to..." She trailed off, unsure how to continue.

"Was to what?" Barker inquired.

"...was to stop Rose and Emma from escaping Ravenhearst?" Moira squeaked.

"What do you mean, Moira?" Barker asked. "How did you come across those names while exploring the manor?"

"The diary I was given?"

"The diary--Moira, you weren't supposed to be given _anything_ for this case! You were only supposed to take pictures!" Barker exclaimed. "Show me the diary."

Moira set the agency laptop on the table and went into her room. A few minutes later, she sat back down on the couch and handed Barker a thick stapled packet. He flipped through the pages, scanning the contents quickly. A transcribed diary about the manor Moira was exploring, written by a woman who had lived in there... no, Moira should not have been given this. After another few minutes of looking, he glanced up at her.

"Do you remember who gave this to you?"

Moira shook her head. "I assume one of the transcribers, I mean... I really don't know anyone at the agency just yet by name or face."

Barker sighed heavily and threw the packet on the table. Moira shrank back at the stern glare he gave her.

"If... Moira, if you're _ever_ given something that's not related to your casework, you need to give it to your supervisor immediately," he stated grimly. "Or else you're going to cause some very nasty and very _messy_ bureaucratic headaches at the agency because you're sticking your fingers in cases where they shouldn't be. Repeat that."

"If I'm given something not related to my casework, I have to give it to my supervisor," Moira parroted back. She clenched the edge of a cushion tightly in a fist, knuckles turning white. "What do we do? What do _I_ do?"

Barker took a deep breath. Then another one. "I am going to call Sterling to report what's happened," he began. " _You_ are going to stay here in the hotel until we've been ordered to continue the investigation, or we have to cancel this assignment and report back to headquarters." He watched Moira nod apprehensively. "And I really hope it's not the latter, because you will not be able to graduate your mentorship and everything you've worked for up to this point will be moot."

"I-I-I u-understand," Moira stammered.

When she thought Barker wasn't looking, she got up from the couch and padded back into her room, closing the door behind her. When she thought she heard Barker talking, she went to sit down on the bed and stared at the wall. Fuck. She probably just fired herself. And disappointed Barker. And disappointed her past family members who had worked in the agency at some capacity in the past.

She _had_ thought the diary was related to this particular case. But looking back... god, Barker's confusion made sense. She should have just asked about the diary before yesterday. Before they drove almost four hours from Edinburgh to Blackpool by car. Hell, right at the moment she'd been given the diary by the agency employee.

Fuck, she was done for, wasn't she?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Nursery room lock is actually one of those "find these 3/4/5 items in order and in very little time" puzzles, but I couldn't find a way to make it work in the context of the story as I was writing, so I made it into an unsolvable puzzle. (งツ)ง

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure if I'll be able to have a consistent update schedule, given the current world events and the stresses of daily life, but I promise to eventually have updates posted.
> 
> If anyone would like to talk, I can be reached at tumblr at fallenidol-453


End file.
